The arrival in cinemas today of the period drama Anna Karenina marks the end of the summer blockbuster season – that annual orgy of expensive, CGI-heavy motion pictures. The Hollywood studios long ago started preparing their basket of treats for next summer, but that won't stop them trying to make sense of what just happened: what worked, what didn't, and what lessons can be learned.

Winner: Superheroes

Audience affection for comic-book crime fighters is nothing new, but the genre's dominance in summer 2012 reached new heights, providing three of the top-five UK box-office hits. That's a big step up from summer 2011, when X-Men: First Class, Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor all failed to crack the summer top 10. Warner Bros will be pleased that, in the UK at least, The Dark Knight Rises out-grossed its predecessor (in the US, it is still $100m behind), and Sony will be happy with the performance of its Spider-Man reboot. Top prize, however, goes to Disney and Marvel: their Avengers Assemble augurs well for the seemingly endless stream of Marvel movies on their way.

Loser: Dance flicks

When StreetDance 2 sputtered to just £3.1m at the UK box-office – a steep, steep fall from StreetDance's £11.6m – commentators wondered whether it signalled the end for the genre, or was just a blip. An even worse performance for Step Up 4: Miami Heat a couple of months later – £2.6m, down from a franchise high of £10.6m with Step Up 2 the Streets – suggests it really is all over for PG-rated romances populated by plucky, sportswear-attired youngsters acrobatically battling for ego, honour and sheer anti-establishment joie-de-vivre.

Winner: Channing Tatum

While Step Up faltered, the franchise's original male star soared to new heights. Magic Mike's $113m US box-office success in June meant that Tatum had delivered three consecutive $100m-plus grosses in the US in less than six months – following The Vow ($125m) and 21 Jump Street ($138m).

Loser: Dr Seuss

In America, they love Theodor Seuss Geisel, and every child seems to know all about the Grinch, the Cat in the Hat and the Hortons of Whoville. Over here, not so much. While Dr Seuss' The Lorax grossed a decent $214m Stateside, in the UK it has struggled, with £7.3m so far. It didn't even match the UK box-office for Horton Hears a Who (£8.7m), considered at the time to be a disappointment.

Winner: Original stories

Yes, of course the summer box-office chart is dominated by sequels and films based on what Hollywood rejoices in calling "existing material", but the presence of two films in the top 10 (Ted and Brave) featuring original characters is vaguely heartening. Less encouragingly, these two hits benefited from the cachet of the brands behind them – Pixar, and Family Guy creator Seth Macfarlane – and are in genres (animation, comedy) that have traditionally proved more open to original ideas.

Loser: Jump-starting the summer in spring

Hollywood studios have long grumbled about the craziness of concentrating so many expensive pictures into the four months of the summer movie season, which runs from May to August. This year, thanks to Euro 2012 football and the Olympics turning chunks of the summer schedule into virtual no-go areas, they had the perfect opportunity to try a different tack. Disney released John Carter in March, and Universal unleashed Battleship in the UK in April. Loss-making final grosses of £4.7m and £7.5m resulted.

Winner: Secret Cinema

With its themed presentations of movie classics in limited runs at unusual locations, Secret Cinema long ago hit on an original formula fusing cinema with live participatory theatre. How to grow profit remained a challenge, but the organisation's presentation in June of its first new-release blockbuster, Prometheus, delivered a win for all parties. With 38 showings spread out over a secrecy-challenging 28 days, Secret Cinema achieved box-office of £730,000, and established a model for the future.

Loser: Foreign language

Away from the intense competition of awards season, the summer can usually be relied upon to deliver a big foreign-language hit, and past successes include La Vie En Rose, Coco Before Chanel and Tell No One. This summer, outside of Asian martial arts actioner The Raid and Bollywood, there were no significant foreign successes. Instead, documentaries (in the English language) stepped up to occupy the space, with impressive grosses for both The Imposter (£694,000 so far) and Searching for Sugar Man (£331,000).

Winner: Scotland

The film market may be global, but it's also national. In most of the UK, Ken Loach's The Angels' Share was positioned as another critically acclaimed offering from one of the country's most celebrated auteurs, albeit one of his more lighthearted efforts. In Scotland, the whisky caper was presented in a mainstream way as the country's answer to The Full Monty, and played every multiplex. Of the £1.9m final UK and Ireland gross, 72% was achieved north of the border. With Brave, Disney achieved 19.4% of its UK/Ireland total in Scotland, as against 8% for a typical Pixar film.